Hi Tech Discovery.

Really?

Nothing easily found about this (18v) on the net.hmmmm

Andrew

A while back,new Discoveries were equipped with a free DVD player in their sales pitch... Gives you something to do while waiting for service when it breaks down!! LOL!! Michael

18V sounds a bit unlikely.

Do you think that the 200 series would be any different. Nearly all vehicles are high tech these days.

Yeah - you'd be waiting a god-awful longer time than 3 days for an 18V car battery... 12V or 24V but not 18.

Even in Blackall you can get batteries for Discos - 12V though.

WOW!!!

18 volts from a 12 volt battery??? That's something pretty special

Or am I missing something?


.

18V needed to run all the electronics?
sounds like another urban myth in the making...

This doesn't make sense to me.

Perhaps, the computer needed 18 volts to run, which can be achieved with a 12 volt to 18 volt adaptor such as the kerio?

Bill.

Ok...he's most likely half right.


Although the 18 volts is a bit high there is a possibility that they did not have the right battery in Blackall.

The Discovery's since 1999 have been running a calcium acid battery. These batteries are capable of being charged at a higher rate which I believe is up to 16 volts. The alternators are designed to charge that high.

Now the problem is that if you use a normal lead acid battery it will boil the battery very quickly. Normal lead acid batteries are only meant to be charged at 14.5 volts max or thereabouts. Acid splattered across the engine bay does a terrific amount of damage.

3 days to get it to Blackall, sounds about right. It's only 830 k's as the crow flies from Brisbane but if there was a calcium battery in stock and it most likely came from Sydney, by the time he found out, ordered it, put it on a truck the job was done.

Cheers.

I own a Disco 3 and I work at a Land Rover dealership. I can categorically state that this post is BS.

Discovery II and III vehicles do use lead calcium batteries, but the final charge voltage is little different from any other 12V battery. These batteries do not charge at a significantly higher voltage than any other lead acid battery either.

I have a Lead-acid Gel battery in parallel with my Lead-Calcium battery at all times while the vehicle is in motion and two years down the track it still holding a charge beautifully.

If push came to shove, you could get by with a well charged 12V lead-acid battery to get yourself out of trouble if you needed to.

As land Rover dealers, we are not supposed to let a Disco out of our workshop if the battery voltage is below 12.7 Volts at rest. That's about as tricky as it gets.

If a Disco has had a flat battery at some stage, the computers may log some spurious codes and some instrument panel indications that should not be there might come up, but I don't know of a single vehicle that has not been able to proceed after the vehicle has been started and the battery reaches a reasonable state of charge - like most modern vehicles.

However, having said all of this, the world is indeed flat and the sun revolves around the earth and there is no need to use electronics to improve engine performance, vehicle ride and stability, brake control and the like. We should all go out and buy a Toyota HJ45 and be done with it.

Cheers,

Russ.